Email Tracking Software

What is email tracking software?

Email tracking software is an online tool that helps businesses monitor and analyze email interactions with customers. It measures the performance of individual emails as well as overall email campaigns by tracking metrics such as the open rate and click-through rate. 

Email tracking tools have a link tracking feature that sends real-time notifications every time a recipient opens an email and clicks a link within it. Businesses can use this data to target their prospects with more relevant email content in future campaigns. 

These tools track the bounce rate, helping businesses understand why some contacts aren't responding and allowing them to take proactive steps to improve delivery rates. They also offer advanced metrics such as location information on target audiences, the devices they use to check emails, and their frequency of email interaction. 

What are some common features of email tracking software?

• Email management: Helps manage incoming and outgoing emails and track email campaign performance. Email management automates the process of sorting messages into folders and tagging them for easy retrieval. It offers custom templates to set up auto-replies, tracks the message status (read or unread) across devices, and schedules delivery for emails in advance. It also helps organize your inbox by filtering out spam or unwanted emails while allowing you to monitor campaigns from within a single platform.

• Click tracking: Tracks the number of times recipients click on email links. Click tracking generates reports that showcase how many people opened and interacted with your emails, including who has read them and when they did so. It provides insights into the performance of your email marketing campaign, allowing you to optimize it for maximum engagement.

• Real-time notifications: Sends alerts when your emails are opened or clicked so you can take immediate action. Real-time notifications allow for a more proactive approach to email marketing and customer engagement, enabling your teams to respond quickly and ensure maximum impact from each email sent.

• Team management: Organizes and monitors your team members' emails, allowing them to prioritize tasks more efficiently. Team management helps you evaluate each member's performance by tracking email open rates and response time. It also offers a drag-and-drop option to quickly assign projects or tasks within a team setting.

• Email reminders: Sends automated email reminders to your team, ensuring important tasks aren’t forgotten. It offers customizable message templates that allow you to create and manage scheduled notifications across time zones. It also tracks the progress of any sent email so your team is up to date on all follow-ups.

• Email templates: Offers a library of preformatted message templates that can be easily customized. It comes with built-in analytics to track email performance in real time. This feature helps save time when sending marketing campaigns or newsletters while still allowing you to customize the look and feel of your messages.

• Scheduling: Helps schedule emails in advance, allowing you to control the delivery time and frequency and offering personalization options such as custom subject lines and images. It provides a quick way to plan and send bulk emails without needing human intervention every step of the way.

• Reporting/analytics: Analyzes and tracks email campaigns to offer insights into performance. This feature lets you generate comprehensive reports that provide key metrics such as the total number of emails sent and delivered, number of opens and link clicks per email campaign or contact group, unsubscribe count, and open rate across devices. 

What are the benefits of using email tracking software?

• Automates email tracking: The software automates the process of monitoring emails, allowing you to track and analyze how your clients receive your messages. It helps save time by identifying suspicious accounts sending spam or malicious links. It also collects data on open rates, click-throughs, and other engagement metrics that provide valuable insights into customers’ communication preferences. Automated email tracking helps ensure you stay connected with your customers while protecting your messages against potential security risks.

• Sends alerts when emails are opened: The open-and-click tracking feature sends an alert every time a prospect opens and clicks your email. The feature helps track customer engagement by measuring the performance of your email marketing campaign and optimizing it for maximum engagement. You can also set up automated follow-up reminders to ensure your team provides timely responses to customer queries.

• Analyzes campaign performance: Email tracking tools provide detailed analytics to help you understand customer behavior and optimize email campaigns for better results. Analytics tracks metrics such as the number of emails sent, open rate, click-through rate, engagement time, and recipient device type. You can use this data for audience segmentation and to create targeted strategies to send personalized communications to customers based on their interests.

• Offers insights into customer engagement: Email tracker software helps you analyze how customers interact with your emails by tracking metrics such as the open rate, click-through rate, and number of conversions per email campaign. This data is essential to understand what content resonates best with your audience. Based on this analysis, you can tweak your future communications to ensure the right message reaches each segment of your target market at an ideal time.

What are the potential issues with email tracking software?

• Privacy violations: Privacy violation is a potential issue with email tracker software, as it tracks and monitors users’ emails without their knowledge or consent. This violates their right to private communications and gives businesses an unfair advantage in gathering personal data for marketing purposes. This type of surveillance also threatens customers’ data security by collecting sensitive information that could get used for malicious purposes. Before shortlisting any software, discuss these concerns with the vendor and ensure their product’s data tracking and collection policies comply with all applicable regulations such as the GDPR.

• False reporting: False reporting, a potential drawback of email tracker software, can lead to inaccurate data, resulting in incorrect insights and poor decision-making for your business. False reports can also create mistrust between your teams and hint at privacy concerns or conflicts of interest among stakeholders. Any issues related to false reporting must be promptly addressed by the software provider to ensure reliable information for analysis.

• Poor data accuracy: Poor data accuracy is a potential shortcoming of using email tracking solutions. Without accurate data, it can get difficult to make informed decisions or understand the effectiveness of your campaigns. Inaccurate data may also lead to incorrect conclusions about customer behavior and marketing activities, resulting in wasted time and resources you could have spent better elsewhere. 

How much does email tracking software cost?

Most email tracking software products on the market are priced on a per month basis, and their entry-level pricing plan ranges from $4.98 to $15* per month. An enterprise product that’s priced higher may include additional features such as customizable customer dashboards, auto-generated customer segments for targeting, and personalized consultations.

*The pricing included is for the entry-level/lowest-priced offerings found on vendor websites as of Jan. 23, 2023.

Key considerations when purchasing email tracking software

• Analyze the accuracy of data tracking. An email tracking tool helps collect data on open rates, click-through rates, and other engagement metrics that provide valuable insights into your customers’ communication preferences. But if this data is inaccurate, you won’t get a precise picture of your customers’ needs, and it could affect the decisions you make, such as which audience segment to target or which content to use for email communications.

• Evaluate the range of analytics available. To better understand how customers engage with your emails, select an email tracking tool that lets you analyze open rates, click-through rates, and campaign conversions, among other metrics. Additionally, look for analytics features that allow you to segment your email contacts by demographic traits or interests to tailor your content more effectively.

• Ensure the software is GDPR compliant. Under GDPR compliance, your business must follow a set of standardized data protection laws when processing or handling email data for EU-based contacts. GDPR-compliant email tracking software will help ensure you’re collecting customer data as per the applicable regulations. 

• Assess the integration capability. Seamless integration of the software with your existing business systems, such as CRM software, will enable data transfer and sharing without the need to keep switching between the tools you use. It’ll also help reduce manual input errors and the time required to transfer data from one system to another. 

• Check the ease of use. Your team members should find the software easy to use. They should be able to quickly learn how the platform works, what it can do, and how to find the information they need. You can assess the product’s ease of use during software demonstrations. You can also check out user reviews to understand if actual buyers find the software intuitive.

Sources

Products evaluated for the pricing calculation were taken from GetApp’s email tracking software directory. The pricing ranges exclude freemium versions of the products. The features highlighted were identified based on their relevance and the percentage of products in GetApp’s directory that offer them.  

Disclaimer

This email tracking software buyers guide was authored by GetApp's content team. We develop our guides using the author’s expertise, insights from 2M+ unique user reviews, and our proprietary data science algorithms to identify trends in user sentiment, preferences, and priorities. Some text was generated with assistance from AI tools.